Steven Frimmer

The Man Who Found the Maya: John Lloyd Stephens Steven Frimmer

"Starting as a typical tourist, John Lloyd Stephens developed
into an adventurous traveler and popular author, hailed as
our greatest travel writer. Then he blossomed into an intrepid
explorer who found over forty sites of the virtually forgotten Maya,
pioneering archaeology in the Americas and rescuing from obscurity
a lost civilization. His incredible travels, first in Europe, the Near East
and the Holy Land, and then in the jungles of Central America and
Mexico, mark him as a kind of nineteenth-century Indiana Jones.
How he transformed from the wandering tourist who scrawled his
name on ancient monuments to the dedicated discoverer whose
theories about the Maya were often years ahead of the scholars is as
fascinating as the exploits he chronicled in his books.
Based largely on Stephens? own writings, this biography presents
the man in the widely different settings that marked his colorful
career ? the society of his beloved nineteenth-century New York,
the forbidding desert of Arabia, plague-ridden Constantinople, and
the uncharted mountains and steaming jungles where the hidden
Maya temples and cities lay under centuries of almost impenetrable
vegetation. Readers will see through Stephens? eyes the hieroglyphic
covered temples of ancient Luxor, the hidden city of Petra, carved out
of living rock, and the moment he comes upon the walls of Copan,
one of the great moments in archaeology. From his childhood in a
booming young New York City, to his years as a lawyer dabbling
in politics, to his travels and his four successful books about those
travels, to his subsequent career as a businessman, Stephens was a
fascinating figure and an interesting one to read about.
STEVEN FRIMMER is a retired editor, with more than thirty years
experience in book publishing, and is the author of three previously
published books on archaeology."